Quality Of Hire
The least-owned metric in recruitment marketing, because it requires connecting media spend to what a person did after they started.
What is quality of hire?
Quality of hire is a composite measure of how well the people you hire perform and stay. It is usually built from ramp time to full productivity, performance rating or output at a fixed point such as six months, retention at 90 days and one year, and hiring-manager satisfaction. It becomes actionable only when each hire is traced back to the advertising source that produced them, so budget can move toward the sources that produce better people.
A Measurable Definition
Quality of hire fails in most organisations because it is defined as an opinion. Define it as a weighted index of collectable facts and it becomes a metric you can optimise media against.
- Time to full productivity, measured against the role's own ramp curve
- Performance score at a fixed point, typically six months
- Retention at 90 days and at one year
- Hiring-manager satisfaction, captured on a fixed short survey
- Internal mobility or promotion within the first two years
Connecting Quality Back To Media
Score each hire, then attribute the score to the publisher, placement and audience that produced them. Within a quarter you can usually see that a small number of sources produce most of the durable hires — and that some of the cheapest sources produce almost none.
Raising Applicant Quality At The Buying Layer
TalentXi builds audiences from the attributes of people who succeed in the role, buys individual impressions against those audiences, filters invalid traffic before the bid, and feeds start and retention data back into optimisation. Reporting stays transparent to publisher and placement level — no black box between spend and outcome.
Optimising To Applications Versus Optimising To Hires
| Optimised to hires | Optimised to applications | |
|---|---|---|
| Bidding signal | Starts and retention | Application volume |
| Effect on screening load | Falls as targeting sharpens | Rises with volume |
| Cheap low-intent traffic | Bid down automatically | Rewarded |
| What the CFO sees | Cost per hire trend | Cost per applicant trend |
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you measure quality of hire?
Pick three to five outcomes you can collect consistently — time to full productivity, performance at six months, 90-day and one-year retention, and hiring-manager satisfaction — weight them, and score every hire on the same scale. Then join that score to the source that produced the hire.
What are the standard quality of hire metrics?
Ramp time, early performance rating, 90-day and first-year retention, hiring-manager satisfaction, and internal mobility or promotion rate. Most organisations combine several into a single weighted index so it can be trended.
What is a good applicant to hire conversion rate?
It varies enormously by role and channel, so it is most useful as a relative measure. Track conversion by source: a source whose conversion is materially below your account average is delivering volume, not candidates, whatever its cost per applicant looks like.
Why do we get so many unqualified applicants?
Because most recruitment media is bought on clicks or applications, which rewards volume rather than fit, and because automated and mass-apply traffic is cheap to generate. Changing the unit you buy — impressions priced on the likelihood that the viewer becomes a hire — changes what arrives.
How do you improve applicant quality?
Target audiences that resemble your successful employees rather than everyone searching a keyword, filter invalid traffic before the bid, tighten role targeting by geography and qualification, and feed hiring outcomes back into the bidding so the system learns what a good applicant looks like for you.
Can you build a lookalike audience from your best employees?
Yes. Attributes of employees who performed and stayed can be modelled into addressable audience segments, and impressions can then be bought against people who resemble them, rather than against anyone who searched a job title.